Ephia Gburek holds a BFA in dance from Columbia University, New York City. She studied intensively with Min Tanaka and Kazuo Ohno in Japan and was a member of the Berlin-based butoh company of Anzu Furukawa, appearing in Furukawa’s final production, GOYA: La Quinta del Sordo. Following her interest in ritual dance, she traveled to study traditional dances in Ghana and in Indonesia. Guided by collaborations with mentors Nia Love and Diego Pinon, she created early works which were a fusion of performance and ritual. In 1998, she co-founded Djalma Primordial Science, a performative and pedagogical collaboration with electro-acoustic musician Jeff Gburek. From within this partnership of listening, she focused her dance on the instability of the body and its relationship to the environment: her dancing body becomes a prosthesis for the viewer to discover the space that surrounds and composes us. Between 2002-2007 their productions (MYOPIA)2, Ci-gît, and Mirrorminded Curiousitease toured widely in the United States and Europe.
Since 2007 Ephia is based in France where she concentrates her work on the relation of body and object, the flux between the animate and the inanimate world. She collaborated with puppeteer Alexandra Vuillet, followed a formation with Claire Heggen, and participated in the creations of the company Scolopendre which incorporate shadow theater, mask and object manipulation. In 2009, her project with dancer Yael Karavan entitled CONTRE-IMAGE was in residence at CCN Rillieux la Pape-Cie Maguy Marin, MICADANSE and Atelier Carolyn Carlson in Paris. In 2011 she established Les Chercheurs de Djalma; this group of ten dancers meet regularly to distort the frontiers between individual and group, body and object, dream and daily reality.